Tenement Years

Reared in ruins, & East London brick dust, lard spread on bread. My figure daubed by days of oil and dirt, a boy by railroad tracks - wrong side. Trains clattered past pumping smutty fumes. Once, a pretty girl visited our tenement, posh clothes, (I mean, not rough flannel), clean hands, neatly dressed. We boys gawped, then then derided. we had no way to acknowledge one so distant from our reality. I told mother, she just shrugged not understanding. She was a lock-in woman & expressed herself as a long ignored dog would when asked about the meaning of life.